The Final Chapter

Senate Will No Longer Be Able To Dismiss Boorish Behavior

BOSTON — In the end what was most astonishing was how astonished we all were.

Common wisdom had said that Bob Packwood might be reprimanded or even censured by the Senate ethics committee, but no more.

Common sense honed from years of Senate-watching said that if he only held out his wrist, his colleagues would slap it and happily get back to business.

But after 2 1/2 years of bizarre twists and turns, after alienating his friends one by one, after refusing public hearings and then demanding them, the senator ran out of allies.

Nevertheless, there was a shock when the ethics committee unanimously imposed its Capitol punishment. The kiss of death was the recommendation to expel Packwood for what Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) called "a systematic abuse of women, power and this Senate."

With 16,000 pages of testimony weighing in against him at 40 pounds, he resigned as a "duty," an "honorable thing to do for this country, for the Senate."

And so, pathetically, ended the career of a man who prided himself on making advances for women in public and degraded himself by making "unwelcome sexual advances" on women in private.

For some, Packwood's most serious breach of ethics is altering the evidence of his diaries or trying to get a job for his ex-wife. But the more remarkable fact is that for the first time, a Senate committee defined sexual misconduct toward women as an abuse of power.

"On the women," Packwood had insisted during the hours when he pursued his punch-drunk defense like a boxer who doesn't know that the fight is over, "I am accused of kissing women, on occasion perhaps overeagerly kissing women, and that is the charge. Not drugging. Not robbing. Kissing."

But the ethics chair, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), disagreed: "These were not merely stolen kisses, as Sen. Packwood has claimed. There was a habitual pattern of aggressive, blatantly sexual advances, mostly directed at members of his own staff or others whose livelihoods were connected in some way to his power and authority as a senator."

Indeed the diaries, exposing the senator's deep cynicism and corruption to public light, flesh out that view. Packwood had little to say about his failed sexual advances, but much about his "successes." In bragging detail, he wrote about women, their names, their bodies, their lives, and then blithely had his secretary type up the entries.

Four years ago, the public watched as Anita Hill's testimony was dismissed and her integrity was attacked by an all-male Senate judiciary committee. Back then, the charges of sexual harassment were debunked as nothing but "she said" fantasies.

Clarence Thomas was elevated to the Supreme Court. But the country was changed in ways that eventually led to Packwood's downfall.

Florence Graves, a reporter watching the Thomas-Hill hearings, was sure that "the next logical story" would be about sexual harassment in the Senate itself. When no one else pursued that line, she did.

Graves began the long, painstaking process of getting 20 women (out of 40) to go on record and break the Packwood story in The Washington Post.

"I think it would have been difficult to get the Packwood story into the paper before the Thomas-Hill hearings," she says now. "It just wasn't a story."

Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) was carried into the Senate on the Year-of-the-Woman tide fueled by anger at those hearings. She was the one who doggedly held the Senate's feet to the Packwood fire.

"In the Thomas-Hill hearings, the Senate was just not in step with the public. It was way behind," Boxer said Thursday, "One thing about being in a democracy--it catches up."

The vice chair of the ethics committee, Sen. Richard Bryan (D-Nev.), is right: Packwood's conduct "would have been unacceptable at the time Christopher Columbus discovered America." But he would never have been taken from the helm.

The Oregonian isn't the first and isn't the only and may not be the worst case of sexual misconduct in the Senate. But he was there when they said "enough."

Today there is a consensus ranging from the religious right to the feminist left, including fed-up women and disgusted men. A consensus that sexual power-tripping isn't just a private matter or a personal peccadillo. In the hard, reluctant verdict of the committee, it's "unethical."

No, there is no room on the Hill for Bob Packwood anymore. Finally, the Senate "gets it."